An Exception No More?

Steve Coll describes a meeting with William Hague, the new British Foreign Secretary:

On foreign policy, it was fascinating to listen to the Foreign
Secretary tic through the usual issue setsIran, Afghanistan, Europe,
global development, humanitarian intervention, etc.and to discover
that there is hardly any distance between his coalition’s views and
that of the Labour government it is succeeding. I’ll save Hague’s
comments about Afghan policy until next week, after a reported article
I’ve been working on for the magazine, in which British policy figures,
has appeared. But on the Afghan war and every other subject discussed,
except perhaps for the European economic crisis, where Hague emphasizes
Britain’s skepticism about the euro monetary project, it was striking
how centrist and even center-left orthodoxy has replaced the radicalism
of the Thatcher years and the subsequent “wet-dry” debates among
British conservatives. I used to hold in my mind the truism that
continental European conservative parties roughly equate to our
Democratic Party in their foreign policy views, but that British
foreign policy conservatism was an exception; no longer, it seems.

And this position, remember, is coming from William Hague, one of the formerly more staunchly Thatcherite of the Tories, and still a critical outreach for Cameron on the Tory right. There was never anything "wet" about William. But he has adjusted to reality, as so many of us have.

(Photo: British foreign secretary William Hague by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty.)

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